Feature: Act of Protest

Caroline Randall Williams ’06 notes that a piece she wrote for The New York Times was a long time coming. “I couldn’t not write it.”

Jana F. Brown

In June, author, writer, and poet Caroline Randall Williams ’06 published an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” In it, Williams wrote, “The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?” Williams, a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University, spoke with Alumni Horae Editor Jana Brown about what inspired her to write the piece, why there is a reluctance among some to reframe the ugliness of America’s past, and what makes her hopeful about the recent protests against racism in the U.S.

What prompted you to write the piece in The New York Times?
In some ways, I have been working on the piece my whole life and figuring out how to balance justified outrage with grace and clarity. Those are the things required to get your point heard. It took me a long time to get there. A lot of my writing has been worrying toward the same kinds of concerns. The two weeks after George Floyd’s death and the weekend of first protests were really seismic for me in terms of the shift I felt in the kind of work I wanted to do. I have asthma and am afraid to go out during COVID-19. I was starting to feel more and more urgent in terms of what I could do, because I was afraid to go outside to protest. Then, there was talk of renaming military bases [affiliated with Confederate leaders], and the president was saying he would withhold funding if anyone tried to change those names. I woke up on a Tuesday morning and this whole article fell out of me onto the page. Part of my confidence in writing was that I knew I had a real witness and a real advocate in Jen Parker [’07]. We were among the only black students in Brewster when she was a Third Former and I was a Fourth Former. Jen and I bonded over that and, later, through reflecting on being black at St. Paul’s during that time. Jen is a staff editor at The New York Times, and I knew my piece would have a real chance at having a home; she was such a beautiful custodian of my art. I wrote the piece because I had to. I couldn’t not write it. It was my act of protest, my first wading into the conversation the world is having right now.

What has been the reaction to what you wrote?
I was expecting some energy from both sides, but have had virtually no negative feedback to date on the piece. That is really promising to me. It’s hard because it’s so humbling and disorienting. But a number of people have genuinely written to me and said they thought they would never change their mind about this and now their mind has changed. I’m grateful that I had the access to my words in a way that would resonate and the chance to speak the words a lot of people know and have lived. I am thankful that [former SPS faculty member] Marshal Clunie taught me to fight for my words. He really was such an exceptional teacher. I went on to be an English major in college and my love of the intersection between words and history came from Fourth Form humanities. The response has been amazing; I have been humbled by it and grateful I had the skills to put that truth into words in a way that resonated with people. It has renewed my belief that you can make a change. We sometimes get tired and wonder what it’s going to take. It has been a real breakthrough for me that this gap can be forged – and that has been heartening.

You wrote in the NYT that your “very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.” When did you become aware of that, and how has it informed your perspective?
I was raised with a knowledge of my genetic inheritance and ancestry. That wasn’t a revelation I grappled with, just something I knew to be true. The notion that my skin color was proof of wrongdoing, that was something I put together much later. I think it was because of the staggering capacity America has for rose-coloring ugly stories and also just my youthful naiveté about what light skin necessarily means. There cannot be consent in a power imbalance. Coming to that revelation, the other part of what sparked me to write the article is when you study World War II Germany, for example, think about how as a culture the practice of Germans has been to look aghast at the actions of their immediate ancestors. Who of these descendants of Confederates will take the cue from Germans and renounce the actions of their own ancestors? I happen to know that I am the descendent of a white Confederate, and I will model the behavior for white people in this position.

Why is the renaming or removal of monuments to Confederate generals a good place to start – and what’s next?
I think it is a good starting point because in order for healing to begin, we have to acknowledge and debride the wounds, take the rubble out of them. You can’t have reconciliation by leaving up monuments to the dead who were wrongdoers. You are not doing a faithful and comprehensive job of examination and reconciliation. You can’t ask someone to walk under a Confederate battle flag or past a monument of someone who perpetuated crimes against humanity and say we are healing. It’s a good faith gesture and also dragging people into the light, inviting people to be on the right side of history. The renaming of monuments means acknowledging that something must be done. It’s a good first step and opens discussions about why, and that needs to swiftly transition into what other less tangible – but more insidious – remnants of their legacy mean in the fabric of America.

You wrote that you are heartened by the recent protests – what makes you feel that way?
There is a different energy for the fight than there has been in a long time. That’s part of what’s different. There were these moments, watching the Cosbys on TV and the Fresh Prince – these moments created a false lull of reconciliation and a will to colorblindness that characterized the late 70s to the mid-90s on the surface level, but had a knee-jerk kickback. I watched Family Matters, and that representation evaporated and we moved into almost a new Jim Crow era. I feel like it has been brewing for a minute and we have reached a critical mass that has allowed momentum. Also, there is a pandemic and the numbers we are seeing are undeniably about the ways American infrastructure fails people of color. Everyone watched George Floyd get lynched on television. Everyone was stuck at home, so average Americans were confronted with an ugliness that people of color were saying was going on but they may have missed. This was a real-time atrocity that everyone witnessed. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere else to look.

You shared that your great-grandfather was the son of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan leader Edmund Pettus. Recently, Civil Rights icon John Lewis’s funeral brigade rode over the bridge named after Pettus for the last time. Can you speak about that contrast and the very good argument for renaming the bridge after John Lewis?
Yes, yes, yes. I have leant my verbal support to a campaign to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There are people who marched across the bridge with Congressman Lewis who feel differently, but I am very excited about opportunities to find ways to honor him. John Lewis is the man who made that bridge worthy of being a part of history. To the degree that bridge matters, it should bear John Lewis’s name. He made important, relevant history on that bridge. It is personal for me, but I don’t need to see my family’s name on that bridge – it’s not about me needing healing, it’s about trying to model that sense of honoring the honorable.

Why do you think there is a reluctance for some to reframe the past?
People don’t like change. People are afraid of change. My answer when people talk about wanting to rewrite our history is you only wrote half of it in the first place, and that is the biggest problem. It’s not a rewriting of history to ask that all the pieces be included. If you try to write a history book about Germany and World War II with only the facts that they fought and lost, but you leave out Auschwitz and don’t discuss what happened there, it doesn’t put them in an accurate context of the scale of the crimes committed. To me, it’s not a rewriting of history to tell the whole story. The fear for some is that they know they have been complicit in oppression. It is natural to want to ignore the acknowledgement of your misdeeds and want to preserve your own sense of virtue. People will go to great lengths to avoid having to examine their own role in evil.

What do you suggest in terms of education of the next generation, so that eventually there is that perspective change?
I would like to see a curriculum that acknowledges what has been taught in the past and what is important to know in the present. I also think looking at what has been in textbooks of the past is an important way for young people to dismantle the beliefs of the older generations. Kids being born now are going to have to fight with what [Republican Senator] Tom Cotton said the other day about slavery being a necessary evil. Kids voting in 18 years will be dealing with that man. We need to have a curriculum that acknowledges what older people have been taught and why that’s only a fraction of the picture and what else needs to be added to the conversation to include multidimensional narratives. I wasn’t taught slave narratives properly until college. I remember at St. Paul’s I was a part of an emotional conversation about [Zora Neale Hurston’s] Their Eyes Were Watching God where I was the only black kid in the room. It’s about equity and equality conversations, cultural competency conversations with educators, a curriculum that does as much work as possible to address the erroneous narratives of the past and fills in the gaps. One of the scary things is non-tangibles, like the idea that the Civil Rights Movement fixed [racial inequality]. American racism became a ghost you couldn’t get your hands around, just an atmospheric thing. When you don’t have evidences written into law, combatting it becomes shadowboxing. Part of figuring out how to educate is figuring out what is still left, which teachers are still saying it’s all over now. How do we throw the book back at them?

Does anything about the current movement make you feel hopeful, and in what ways?
I am hopeful and wary at the same time. To me, what will have to happen is that normal white people are going to have to figure out how to care and stay caring for a while. We can’t just do it alone. I don’t know what their capacity is for this, what their stamina is. I hope the white people I love are strong enough for this. That is the big question. What I am excited by is that people are realizing their capacity for empathy is greater than they realized, and that is important.

To read The New York Times opinion piece by Caroline Randall Williams ’06, visit nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html.